No matter how many missions to Mars she takes part in, the sheer joy of unearthing discoveries about the red planet never gets old for Mariek Schmidt.
Three months after its launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the agency’s Europa Clipper has another 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to go before it reaches Jupiter’s orbit in 2030 to take close-up images of the icy moon Europa with science cameras.
A graduate research assistant at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of The University of Alabama system, has published a paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics that builds on an earlier study to help understand why the solar corona is so hot compared to the surface of the sun itself.
Burrowing under soil opens up a whole new world, especially when that soil is on other planets. Getting under the top layer of regolith on a world such as Mars could give access to a world still extant with life, whereas, on the moon, it could lead to discovering a water source.
With an assist from the NEID spectrograph, a team of astronomers have confirmed the existence of exoplanet Gaia-4b—one of the most massive planets known to orbit a low-mass star. Gaia-4b is also the first planet detected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft using the astrometric technique.
Last year, a study led by planetary scientist Richard Cartwright at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, proposed that deposits of carbon dioxide ice and other carbon-bearing molecules on Uranus’s moon Ariel likely originated from chemical processes inside the moon—possibly even from a subsurface ocean.
This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month presents HH 30 in unprecedented detail. This target is an edge-on protoplanetary disk that is surrounded by jets and a disk wind, and is located in the dark cloud LDN 1551 in the Taurus Molecular Cloud.
Even though humans have pondered the moon since the first of us looked skyward, there is still much we don’t know about it.
We can’t help ourselves but wonder about life elsewhere in the universe. Any hint of a biosignature or even a faint, technosignature-like event wrests our attention away from our tumultuous daily affairs. In 1984, our wistful quest took concrete form as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Galaxies are astronomical objects composed of billions or even trillions of stars. Our Earth and solar system are just a tiny part of the Milky Way; it is one of countless galaxies in the universe. These immense systems are the fundamental building blocks of cosmic structure. During the universe’s 13.7 billion-year history, the first few billion years marked a golden age for galaxy formation, when galaxies actively turned their gas reservoirs into new stars.
A collaboration between Nordita, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, hosted by Stockholm University, KTH and Google Quantum AI explores how gravitational fields influence quantum computing hardware, laying the foundation for advances in quantum sensing.
Boeing executive Mark Nappi had been the face of the company’s Starliner program during its beleaguered Crew Flight Test to the International Space Station that ultimately left its crew of two NASA astronauts behind when the spacecraft returned to Earth last year.
SpaceX said it was pushing to Tuesday an evening launch attempt that could mean a sonic boom may rattle parts of Central Florida as the company aims to bring its booster back for a rare land recovery.
Physicists have performed a simulation they say sheds new light on an elusive phenomenon that could determine the ultimate fate of the universe.
In July, the Mount Rainier white-tailed ptarmigan was officially listed as threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), 14 years after the Center for Biological Diversity first petitioned for its listing.
Expected to launch no earlier than Thursday, Feb. 27, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory will provide astronomers with a big-picture view of the cosmos like never before.
Analysis of data from NASA radar aboard an airplane shows that the decades-old active landslide area on the Palos Verdes Peninsula has expanded.
Mining ocean resources needed for electric cars and other devices is currently a hot issue of dispute. Final resolution of how or whether the seabed should be exploited is pending. Outcomes in this contentious area could create precedents that could impact decisions about mining the moon.
The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a supernova-hosting galaxy located about 600 million light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Hubble captured this image roughly two months after a supernova named SN 2022aajn was discovered. The supernova is visible as a blue dot at the center of the image, brightening the hazy body of the galaxy.
Sailing has been a mainstay of human history for millennia, so it’s no surprise that scientists would apply it to traveling in space. Solar sailing, the most common version, uses pressure from the sun to push spacecraft with giant sails outward in the solar system. However, there is a more technologically advanced version that several groups think might offer us the best shot at getting to Alpha Centauri—light sailing.
